Twitch Plays Pokemon, hundreds of viewers controlling one game

Have you ever seen two gamers arguing over taking a share of the controller? The two of them fighting to be the one controlling the game? Now imagine that scene with anywhere from 100 to 120,000 people all fighting for control at once. For a few years now a small channel on the streaming website Twitch has grown in popularity and infamy over a little social experiment it calls "Twitch Plays Pokemon" (shortened to TPP).


The main objective of Pokemon is to travel the world capturing various Pokemon species, forming a team of up to 6 Pokemon with them and using them to strategically battle other wild Pokemon and trained Pokemon in order to become the world champion when you reach the toughest trainers in the game, building up your team and making them stronger from experience and training in order to take on tougher enemies in the game. The general idea behind the experiment is that the streamer sets up a new playthrough of the game and through some clever coding allows the livechat for the livestream to control the game by inputting commands into the chat. If a person in the chat wants to make the protagonist walk forward it will register that input and transfer it to the game to make it so. The interesting part about this experiment however is that any and all viewers can type in commands at the same time, which as you can imagine results in utter chaos.

Even trying to walk in one direction is a struggle

Having several hundred people all trying to control the game at once leads to all sorts of problems. . Not all players want to do the same thing in the game, many will have different ideas of what is the best path to progress which results in a conflict of interests and naturally there are also many players who simply want to stall progress and annoy the ones who actually want to complete the game. Walking into walls and getting stuck in different menu's is a common issue for those trying to play amidst the spam of commands.


Simple tasks for a single player become ridiculously difficult when so many different people are trying to do thousands of commands at once faster than the game can cope with. This can lead to some hilarious instances of Pokemon battles taking several minutes because the constant spam of inputs keeps making the Pokemon do the wrong command. Even trying to give one of your Pokemon a nickname results in it being called a complete mess of random characters like "ABBBBBBK(" and "JLVWNNOOOO". Yes, these were actual names given as a result of several hundred people trying to name it at once.



What's truly amazing about this experiment is despite the difficulty in controlling the character, fighting battles, putting up with unhelpful players and the slight delay between when the chat input is entered and when it's seen on the stream...the TPP community has actually completed several Pokemon games. Through some insane amount of trial and error mixed with luck the viewerbase for this stream has somehow managed to slog their way to victory and towards the games end credits. Despite the sheer number of input and players trying to control this game, progress is still made...eventually. To this day the TPP still regularly attempts to playthrough a different Pokemon game with different completion conditions every time and has succeeded in doing so each time. Sure it may take a long time and a lot of tears are shed in frustration but they still do it.

You can actually witness them playing at this very moment, the stream is currently playing through the game Pokemon Crystal as part of it's 2nd Year Anniversary and has been ongoing since 14th February 2016. Heck you can try to join in if you want, because amongst all the constant barrage of attempted inputs, it could be yours that the game registers at just the right moment that allows progress to be made. Even if you have no intention to play, watching the madness of those that do is always amusing and a great laugh.

http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon

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